In silico tests on sequence motif significances for human tissue specific genes

Abstract

Identification and analysis of tissue-specific (TS) genes and their regulatory activities play an important role in understanding the mechanisms of the organism, disease diagnosis and drug design. Although so far we are not clear about the mechanisms totally, the sequence features of TS genes are becoming an important clue. In this paper we used an integrated pipe line to discover sequences motifs for the promoter regions of TS genes. To test the significances of those motifs in a specific tissue, we used hypotheses test approaches including Bayesian hypothesis, Binomial dis tribution and traditional z- test. We finally got 2784, 1204 and 703 motifs respectively out of 3244 motifs ob tained in discovery phase using above three tests from 3954 TS genes across 83 human tissues. 52.7% of those motifs can be found in public databases available.